Thursday, 23 February 2012

$20 the PDF in O'Reilly
25 GBP the paper back in Amazon (but not available until march)

Adopted as the undisputed Perl bible soon after the first edition appeared in 1991, Programming Perl is still the go-to guide for this highly practical language. Perl began life as a super-fueled text processing utility, but quickly evolved into a general purpose programming language that’s helped hundreds of thousands of programmers, system administrators, and enthusiasts, like you, get your job done.

In this much-anticipated update to "the Camel," three renowned Perl authors cover the language up to its current version, Perl 5.14, with a preview of features in the upcoming 5.16. In a world where Unicode is increasingly essential for text processing, Perl offers the best and least painful support of any major language, smoothly integrating Unicode everywhere—including in Perl’s most popular feature: regular expressions.

Important features covered by this update include:

New keywords and syntax
I/O layers and encodings
New backslash escapes
Unicode 6.0
Unicode grapheme clusters and properties
Named captures in regexes
Recursive and grammatical patterns
Expanded coverage of CPAN
Current best practices